15.1 | Civilian
personnel
785.
The Inquiry
received conflicting evidence about whether those differences
had
been
resolved.
786.
Dr Shafik
told the Inquiry:
“ Peter
Ricketts, the Permanent Secretary of the Foreign Office, and Bill
Jeffrey, the
Permanent
Secretary at the Ministry of Defence, and I, had a series of
conversations
about this
over 2008 and we worked very hard to see whether we could develop
a
common duty
of care regime for all civilians, and the security teams,
particularly in
the MoD and
the FCO, worked very hard on this, and I’m sure they could give
you
more
detail, but in the end of that process, we realised that our
civilians are doing
such
different things that it didn’t make sense to have identical
regimes.” 497
787.
Mr Bowen
told the Inquiry:
“Duty of
care was a problem, but it was a problem actually that was gripped,
or we
tried to
grip it at a very senior level. Permanent secretaries were engaged
in this,
and tried
to resolve issues.” 498
788.
Sir Suma
Chakrabarti identified two key lessons about duty of
care:
“One is
about unifying tour lengths, and the other is about trying to unify
terms and
conditions
around staff security and duty of care. The latter has happened. So
FCO
and DFID
have the same standards.” 499
789.
Sir Gus
O’Donnell told the Inquiry that, after a trip to Helmand Province
in
Afghanistan
with the FCO and MOD PUSs, he said to one of them: “One of the
issues
we really
need to sort out here is terms and conditions for people sent
abroad and
duty of
care issues.” 500
Sir Gus
concluded that terms and conditions were “not
completely
harmonised”. The process was “not finished yet, but I think it has
made
a lot of
progress”.
790.
In additional
evidence to the Inquiry, Sir Gus O’Donnell
stated:
“The FCO
and MOD use different systems of risk assessment and
management,
reflecting
the different roles, purposes, and levels of training for their
personnel
when
deployed to high threat environments (DFID follow FCO
arrangements). In all
locations,
security arrangements for military and civilian personnel are
determined
according
to the threats present, and assessed on a case by case basis. There
is no
“standard”
or “standards” of duty of care as the practical discharge of duty
of care is
case and
context specific.
497
Public
hearing, 13 January 2011, page 35.
498
Public
hearing, 16 December 2009, page 76.
499
Public
hearing, 22 January 2010, page 36.
500
Public
hearing, 28 January 2011, page 85.
377